His team found after reviewing records on 300,000 people that the readings were just as accurate after a night's fast as after a morning at the pancake house.

The review also looked at whether testing for apolipoproteins, which bind to fat to create lipoproteins, might be a more accurate way to test for heart risk than measuring LDL (bad) and HDL (good) cholesterol numbers.

The answer to that question was no.

This is a good example of the kind of research that is going to become common in the age of health reform. The question was whether one test might be more cost-effective than another, the answer was no, so the standard protocol in Britain, where the research was conducted, will reflect that.

That's how comparative effectiveness works. You measure two procedures against a large number of cases and draw conclusions as to whether something that adds expense also adds value. U.S. doctors are not contractually bound to consider such research in making their decisions, but insurers will soon make them.

Heck, so far as I know my doctor may still insist I fast before my next visit. But now I've got ammunition to say no. And while we're at it, I'll say, let's schedule it for after I finish my daily writing for Smartplanet. Thank you, Dr. Danesh!

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.
DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.
My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.